AFROatitudes é mais uma ferramenta que dá continuidade à batalhas que venho travando durante toda minha vida pela inclusão da população negra no Brasil e a conexão com os povos da diáspora.
AFROattitudes is one more tool that continues the battles I've been fighting all my life for the inclusion of black people in Brazil and the connection with people of the diaspora.

I just arrived from the movie theater and I had to write this post before I go to bed. I wouldn’t be able to handle myself until tomorrow. So, today, I was brave enough to have a date with myself and decided to go watch All Eyez on me. I wished I could have several people by my side, but I didn’t have so I went alone, and had to control myself and not poke the guy that was in the next seat to tell him my comments.

I confess that I went to the movies waiting for a terrible movie. I thought I would write one line, telling you guys to save some money and wait to see it on Redbox, especially after I read some bad reviews.
But actually the movie surprised me.

I will try not to post any spoiler here, but I am going to share some of my feelings regarding this movie.

First of all, the movie reinforced a feeling that I carry with me since I wrote my Master’s thesis that Tupac and Big’s deaths are a symbol of the Black genocide, and how they kill us in our more productive age and that how far we go, more we bother them.

The movie also shows that a MC like Tupac doesn’t rely only in his own talent. Considering that nowadays several mediocre MCs think they are the best on it, Tupac only was one of the best, if not the best rapper of all time because he had a foundation. His mother, as a Black Panther taught him, what resistance was, she taught him how to fight against the system and to recognize the tools of the system. The guy used to read the newspaper, the guys used to read the classics, the guy went to study theatre, the guy was versatile, and he was not limited. He had a formation. Those are some of the reasons why he used to rock with his rhymes.

Like many other Mcs after him, and in a certain way many of us who have any kind of visibility, Tupac didn’t see himself as a leader, he didn’t want to be a leader and had to be reminded how powerful the mic in his hands was. How the ideas propagated were more lethal than any other weapon that he could carry and that he was a reference and a leadership even it was not his intention.

The movie also made me think, that even those who know the tools of the system and develop strategies to fight against them, still can be involved and shot by them. Afeni Shakur with her addiction and Tupac being arrested are demonstrations of this.

It make me think in youth arrogance, in how, when we are young, we think we know everything and we can say everything we want. But then, I remember that he was only 25 and that a 25 years old Black man was able to conquer the world with his music and attitude.

Furthermore, the similarity between Demetrius Shipp Jr, the actor who plays Tupac and Pac himself
make us feel as if we were saying Tupac alive again, as if these 20 years were not gone. I felt as if I were in a full screen version of Coachella.

The movie also took me to other time and place and reminded me of the talks that I had with friends seated in the sidewalk and listening to his songs and guessing if he was really dead.

I also could not stop myself from comparing Tupac with Brazilian rapper Mano Brown, of course each of them has his own flow, but the strong ideas, the charisma with the audience, and even some aspects of their personal life, make me thing about similarities between them.

I thought the movie was good, poetic and intense as Tupac used to be. The same kind of movie that let us sad in the end, even we previously knew what would happen. But the most beautiful thing was to hear the brothers and sisters in the back of the movie theater yelling: “preach bro, yeah preach” after every word of resistance that was said there.

*This post’s title is an excerpt of Mano Brown’ song Foi num baile Black

The price of healing
By: Daniela Gomes and Dada Mkutano Collective (this text was written by 5 women)

It is really interesting to me that even we are creating posts about everything in social media there are some subjects that are so painful that we avoid talking about them. I have some subjects that are hard to deal with and this is one of them.

One day I heard someone saying that a Black woman has the power to heal the community, because she is the one who gives birth. At that moment, I thought it was so beautiful, because I thought about the power of the creation and the process of reproduction that is able to generate healing. At that moment, the beauty of thinking on my belly as a place that would start something so powerful really enchanted me, especially because it was a Black woman who said it.

My admiration for this thought didn’t finish, but at the same time, I have been thinking about the responsibility that it put in our shoulders and the things that the community asks from us because of it. So I wonder: what is the price of healing?

According to this talk, which is correct by the way, the healing process would happen because Black women are responsible for generate, create, feed, caring, to watch over and love and that would generate a chain of positive things that will be disseminated in the whole community. This is awesome and can work if it was put in practice.

The issue here is that some people decided to think that it means that we as Black women are the only responsible for this healing and that in addition to everything that I already mentioned here, we also have to fix other people’s emotions and carry people in our shoulders.
In this way, although it was not the original intent of this concept, in a claim for the preservation and healing of our community the afro naughtiness keeps perpetuating and multiplying every day.

We face a lot of trouble, our emotions get broken, we suffer in abusive relationships and we do all this to preserve our community, so we don’t expose the other, inside and outside the activism, but feel people do the same for us. This type of violence and reproduction overpass boarders and are reproduced everywhere in the Diaspora.

In my opinion, a clear example of this idea of pass over our pain to “heal” the community is Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas case. You all know how Anita was harassed by Clarence while she was working for him and how she stood up against his nomination to the Supreme Court because he was a predator. You probably knows how she was massacred by part of the community who thought she should be quiet about it, and pass over her suffering so a Black man could be in the Supreme Court.
In other words, to not let him exposed, Anita should be sacrificed.

Anita is just one Black woman who faced something like that and we can’t think that it happens in the U.S. Actually in Brazilian activism we have several of them. They pretend they are pillars of our community, symbols of resistance, but when we go deeper they are rotten people who are destroying the lives of Black women and children.

I remember that in each of Dada Mkutano meetings (Dada Mkutano is a Black women meeting that I coordinate with more four friends, where we do picnics to talk about our lives and try to heal) there was a huge number of women who were suffering, crying and using that space to share the same kind of pain and abuse. Women from 15 to 60 years old narrating exactly the same things.

There are a lot of examples, since men who physically and emotionally abused of the women, to those who have children with several of them without recognize any of the kids, don’t give their name to the children and when they are charged they request women to pay the DNA test and threat them saying they are going to sue them. Others who assume their children, but don’t pay child support, leaving all the responsibilities in the women shoulders and demand her to give financial support to him as well; but that on FB post pics smiling and posing as father of the year, even telling stories of how the woman would be the abuser, trying to revert the game. Other are beating their wives up and blaming them when the marriage is over, and there are others, and others, and others…

Then they follow, being lengthy on FB, pretending on social media that they have character, selling their products, writing revolutionary poetry and being gurus of a lot of people, who quote them and keep applauding them, because some people believe in everything they see on social media.

Meanwhile, we as Black women keep follow alone, even we have to deal with the pain, the trauma so we can generate the mentioned healing of the community.

So to preserve our community, we keep those stories for ourselves, without mentioning their names, so we don’t expose Black men, so we don’t show our dirty laundry, so we don’t destroy our community and we help them in their healing process.

But my doubt is who is worry about our healing? Who is getting worried or doing something for us, while this emotional harassment keep killing us day after day, because it brings us depression, cancer and so many other physical and emotional diseases. I only see women doing that. I see Black women getting together in squares, parks, going to counseling, meditating, doing yoga, searching to improve their spirituality, finally doing everything to break the cycle. However, in this process we are always alone and people are demanding the same thing from us: silence.

The consequences of not talking about this come not only for us, and our children who are neglected but it also reach other women who will be new victims. Because when we don’t talk about this, these same men will leave without consequences, and will be reproducing their evil acts again and again the whole time.

Women who meet them after us don’t know anything about their historic of oppression and violence and buy the discourse of the man who was treated unfairly by a crazy Black woman. This has been happening with many of us. Me included. I don’t really like to talk about my personal life, but I can’t leave myself out of it. Because of the low self-esteem that racism bring to us, I also had my own parcel of abusive relationships.

In my last relationship, I was cheated in a really cruel way. One day, talking with my then boyfriend, I asked about his ex and he told me she hated him, when I asked why, he told me that this was a western thing that as an African man he couldn’t understand. At that time I was so in love that this sentence went unnoticed, but today, although I stopped blaming myself by his lack of character, I think the tip was right there in front of me, because if his ex-girlfriend hated him, she probably had good reasons for that, because hate is a strong word to being used in a banal way.

I wish I had the chance to know who he really was. Many of us wish that. So, I claim for us to break the culture of silence. That this culture can end and we don’t cover for them anymore.
That we can of course generate life and healing, but we don’t have to carry the whole pain of the world in our back. The growth of our community must be preserved, but our tears, bodies, pain and death can’t be the price of healing.

Note: This article was created first as a FB post, and then my friends thought it would be a nice subject to approach in the blog. You will notice that the text talks about specific issues of the Afro Brazilian community that may or may not making sense in other countries.
I have been thinking of how entrepreneurship has been valued among the Afro Brazilian community and mainly inside the Brazilian Black movement. Statistics show an increase among Black entrepreneurs in Brazil and other data that shows the success of those who decide open there own business. These cases may influence some of us to decide open our own business and become entrepreneurs as well.
Being a Black entrepreneur can have different meanings, since open your own beauty shop or a small restaurant in the hood, till, for those who are activists create their own brand or offer services that looks like the community, and that can be earrings, head wraps, a book, a purse. In these past years, this segmented market focused on those who demonstrated their activism in the consumption of products that illustrate their activism has been increasing each day, and this is really great.
As an activist and as someone who has been observing the growth of several Black entrepreneurs in the activist events I am particularly happy with this fact. I feel happy when I see Ana Paula Xongani from Xongani on TV, or when I meet Lucia Makena with the Makena’s Dolls or when I remember that I used to go to Feira Preta, when it was located in the Benedito Calixto square using sandals and now it is an event that join thousands of people in huge spaces such as Convention centers. This is so beautiful.
But there is another side of this that makes me really sad. When I think that while some people are working hard to create, to innovate, to think about a product, others just go there and just plagiarize, without any shame, the other person work. This is really really sad.
I see for example, the work of Boutique de Krioula, a company that increased so fast that they extended their business of selling turbans only to customized earrings, with their own design, where it piece as its own print that is created with the activism on mind and unfortunately a person that is part of the Black movement goes there and plagiarize the work, without any scrupulous. After a while so much people are copying it, that a big “smart” entrepreneur that only want to makes money start to create pirate copies in large scale and sell it in the dollar store or at any jewelry store in the corner. In the end the brother who spent hours creating something in his neighborhood won’t make a dollar from it. This is really sad because the profiteer that pirated it was the last instance, but everything started with a brother cheating on the other. Unfortunately, look likes that this betrayal became something common among us.
I am not even an entrepreneur and at least two similar situations happened with me. While I was doing my field research in Brazil in 2015, my friends and I decided to create an event named “picnic das pretas”, a Black women meeting, where the basic idea was to have a picnic in a park and talk about our feelings and issues. We created an event on FB and it was a success, but after few days, another person created an event with the same name in another place. We were so upset, but we just thought about a new name, more exclusive and that would be more meaningful to us: Dada Mkutano. In another moment, a person created a blog with a name that is really similar to my blog’s name. It made me so sad, because this blog is six years now and it is like a son to me and the person just goes there and copy it. This is so painful.
Of course people will turn around and restart when something bad like that happen, each Black entrepreneur has enough talent to use this disillusion to reinvent themselves. In my specific case, we decided to find a new name to our meetings and I am thinking about to remodel my blog, to have more visibility in this millennial world where people are youtuber or digital influencers and I am still writing, lol. Of course we reinvent ourselves, but this kind of thing is really tiring and annoying.
Of course competition will exist. It doesn’t mean that you can’t sell turbans because another sister is selling turbans, what I mean here is that you can’t plagiarize her work. You need to know what your differential is, what you are presenting that is new.
I compare with the hip hop world in Brazil. Growing up as a teenager, I saw several rap groups emerging, a lot of them. Some from our neighborhoods, in our schools, and even some really big groups. Many of these groups had one thing in common: Instead of having their own style, they used to copy the style of Racionais MC’s (the main rap group in Brazil). They had good rimes, a nice flow, but they were imitating another group style and that was not something attractive to the audience. What did happen to those groups? Those from that time who found their own style were able to survive, became big artists and shine in the rap world. However, those who were only a copy of Racionais, were lost in the time, and nobody even hear about their name. Because Racionais, have their own magic.
I observe a lot of Black Brazilians talking about Black Money and using the African American community as an example of how the Afro Brazilian community can be strengthened by buying from other Black people and etc. So let me tell you something that you could learn from them: When a Black American gets highlighted because he was the first entrepreneur in any area, or doing anything new, no matter if it is to create the first stylized bow tie or whatever it is, other people in the Black community become happy about it, they buy the product and those who want to be an entrepreneur will think about what kind of product they can create to also be the first Black American to do something, whatever it is. No one wants to be number two. Everyone thinks about innovate. Then, it gives space to a gamma of products , all produced and consumed by the Black community and that strengthens our economy. But in Brazil what is happening at this moment is a person trying to bury the other.
Its reminded me that one time I heard a person saying that people in the Black political movement in Brazil are like crabs in a bucket, where everyone is trying to get out, but instead of pushing those who are in the top out of the bucket, they pull down those who are on top.
What I am trying to say is that if your idea is strengthen the Black community, plagiarize someone else product is not the right way to do it. Because this logic of cheating and copying isn’t afro entrepreneurship, instead it is actually anthropophagy, cannibalism and it won’t make our movement grow. Now, if you are just concerned with profit and not give a fuck about the community, so that is another thing and it shows exactly who you are.
To help our community grow is necessary to have ideas that are diverse, an offer of different products and services. So, while the sister creates the Facebook group Afrodengo to introduce Black people to each other and it is a success, you don’t need to plagiarize it, even copying their name and logo. If you think the idea is cool, you should go further and think about something new, that can go over it, like the first dating website in Brazil (see, how that is cool, you are not depending on lil Zuckerberg anymore and now you will be your own version of San Valentine). If Xongani creates the first afro bridal gown in Brazil, you don’t need to copy it, because Ana Paul has her own magic, but if you are interested in this market, just go there and create the first Afro wedding collection, or the first thematic wedding company, offering decoration and buffet service with this theme (imagine how many brides will buy Xongani’s dresses and when they ask Ana if she knows a buffet , who is she going to indicate? Of course that is you). If a sister is selling customized t-shirts and you want to sell it, you don’t need to copy her design, you can be the first Black person to create a stylized white clothes’ collection (have you wondered how many white clothes are sold in Brazil?). If Patricia Santos created Empregueafro, the first HR company focused on the Black population and offers Consulting services to companies that will help them increase corporate diversity and will help to change the excluding mentality of the job market and include more Black people on it, you won’t offer the same product to the same companies, instead you will see how you can complement Patricia’s work, creating a partnership with her, or offering courses training courses that can supply the client demands. If Ebony English offers English courses with Black culture, you shouldn’t go there and create the same thing, maybe you should be the one creating the first exchange program specialized in this kind of course or a tourism agency, in that case Ebony can even create partnerships with you.
These are only few examples that I can think right now, but what I really want to say is: whatever you decide to do, find your own magic and stop copy your buddy’s work.

Quem sou eu

Doutoranda em Estudos Africanos e da Diáspora Africana, Mestre em Estudos Culturais, Especialista em Mídia, Informação e Cultura e Jornalista.
Dentre minhas principais atividades está a luta em favor da população negra no Brasil, que é vista por mim, como missão de vida.
Milito desde os 13 anos, momento em que "Afrosurtei", isto é, descobri que minha ancestralidade faz de mim uma mulher negra. / PHD student in African and African Diaspora, Master in Cultural Studies, Specialist in Media, Information and Culture, and Journalist. Among my main activities is the struggle for the black population in Brazil, which is seen by me as a life mission.I've been militating since I was 13, when I "afrofreaked", that means, I discovered that my ancestry makes me a black woman!
P.S all the English texts were translated by me. It may contain some grammar mistakes. As my proficiency in English is increasing the quality of the texts are being improved. If English is your first language, feel free to send me editing suggestions.